We study the problem of supervised learning of event classes in a simple temporal event-description language. We give lower and upper bounds and algorithms for the subsumption and generalization problems for two expressively powerful subsets of this logic, and present a positive-examples-only specific-to-general learning method based onthe resulting algorithms. We also present a polynomial-time computable "syntactic" subsumption test that implies semantic subsumption without being equivalent to it. A generalization algorithm based on syntactic subsumption can be used in place of semantic generalization to improve the asymptotic complexity of the resulting learning algorithm. A companion paper shows that our methods can be applied to duplicate the performance of human-coded concepts in the substantial application domain of video event recognition.

This page is copyrighted by AAAI. All rights reserved. Your use of this site constitutes acceptance of all of AAAI's terms and conditions and privacy policy.